Motherhood has opened up a whole new level of understanding of God for me. I think most of us feel that way about love - you really understand how God loves us when you experience that for your children - but I find it to be true in so many other areas too.
Cheap grace is a doctrine made famous by my man Bonhoeffer. It's always been a slippery one for me to understand because when we decide to follow Christ and receive His grace, we are promised that there is no more shame, no more condemnation, and that nothing we can do can add to or take away from the cross. But. There is cheap grace and there is costly grace. This is shown over and over in the gospels when Jesus invites people to follow Him. There is always a cost to the follower, whether it is selling all their belongings, leaving their occupations or families, or facing very real persecution. Remember that he said "So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14:33) Grace is freely offered to all, yes, but it is not cheap. And much of the time, we treat it as cheap and therefore meaningless, and it prevents us from becoming true disciples of Christ.
Take my children, for example. This is a pretty typical scenario these days. When my daughter does something like hit her brother, we do the standard "you hurt your brother, tell him you're sorry", and a she'll offer up a halfhearted apology and run right along and keep playing. For a while this was happening constantly and finally I heard myself tell her, "it's not enough to just say sorry, you need to quit doing it!" Then I wondered if what I had said was right. Don't we teach that a simple confession is enough to receive forgiveness? How is obedience linked to grace?
Contrast that with my son. He is my no means a perfect child, but his tendency when he does something like hit his sister is to immediately start crying out "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm soooo sorry!" It takes me by surprise almost every time. I forgive both of the kids the same, of course, but the dynamic is different. I find that my heart is more soft toward my son in those moments because I see that he understands what he has done and he offers his apology without prompting from me. And I wonder what that might be telling me about God and grace.
Bonhoeffer says, "Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian 'conception' of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins... no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin."* My daughter tends toward cheap grace. She does not want to acknowledge her wrongdoing (I should confess that she gets this from me) so she glosses over it with a quick meaningless apology. Bonus points if she can deflect the blame to someone else so that it's really, really not her fault. She knows forgiveness will come anyway, so there is no real need to recognize her own guilt, much less actually try to do things differently. But if she loves me and trusts me to guide her on this journey to becoming a responsible adult, she will need to at some point get over her stubborn self and do what I ask of her.
When we're talking about our relationship to Jesus, this is pretty major. If we've declared that Jesus is our Lord, what does it say about that decision if we constantly refuse to change or acknowledge our own brokenness? This doesn't mean walking around with our head hung in shame, but we must recognize that God's grace is not cheap. It cost Jesus His own life, and in return He calls us to lay down our own lives. "In the gospels the very first step a man must take is an act which radically affects his whole existence."* This is no mere 'asking Jesus into your heart', this is costly grace. Obedience and submission are still A Thing, even though we've been granted this marvelous grace that pardons all our sins past and future. Actually BECAUSE we've been granted this marvelous grace then we realize that it is worth laying down anything we thought had value before, because it is all rags in comparison to the living God who loves us so.
* Bonhoeffer quotes taken from The Cost of Discipleship
